Man with grudge kills 10 in Alabama shooting spree

Michael McLendon killed his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins and five others
By Mark Wallheiser
Reuters News Service

U.S. authorities trying to piece together why a man killed 10 people in the worst rampage in Alabama's history focused on Wednesday on the grudges that he bore.

Michael McLendon killed his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins and five others including an 18-month-old girl in a spree on Tuesday that bore the hallmarks of a planned attack.
In his bedroom, authorities found three lists that included details on people he believed had wronged him. Though none of the people who died were on the lists, they provided clues to his state of mind.

"You kill the people you mean to kill, the worst first," said Gary McAliley, the district attorney in Coffee County, where the spree began.

"If you have an axe to grind you list the people you want to kill the worst," McAliley said, adding that the three lists did not represent a hit list but rather suggested McLendon bore grudges.

At the top of one of the lists, McLendon wrote of one grievance -- that someone at the job he had left the previous week had reported him for not wearing earplugs.

The 28-year-old gunman, who lived with his mother, was armed for the shooting spree with two military assault rifles, a handgun and a shotgun. More than 200 rounds were fired in the rampage, which started at a home in Kinston in southeastern Alabama.

Aside from family members, McLendon killed the wife of a local deputy sheriff and her 18-month-old daughter, who were visiting family members.

See: Man with grudge kills 10 in Alabama shooting spree

Russian scholar says US will collapse — next year

There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010
by Mike Eckel
Associated Press

If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.

Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.

"There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy — a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.

The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.

Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.

He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" — when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.

Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."

Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.

Asked for comment on how the Foreign Ministry views Panarin's theories, a spokesman said all questions had to be submitted in writing and no answers were likely before Wednesday.

It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.

Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."

But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.

"I can't imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart," Malashenko told the AP.